What’s New in Bamboo 3.1?

Bamboo will continue to focus on making it easier for agile teams to automate their build, deploy and release process.

Atlassian have just released
version 3.1 of the Bamboo continuous integration server, with improved
Bitbucket and GitHub integration, and with the Universal Plugin
Manager included. In this interview, we speak to Atlassian’s
Giancarlo Lionetti, to find out more about this new Bamboo
release.

JAXenter: The 3.1 release of Bamboo replaces
‘Builders’ with ‘Tasks.’ What are the benefits of this new
concept?

Giancarlo Lionetti: Previous to Bamboo 3.1,
Builders were the heart of your Build. Unfortunately it was only
possible to have one Builder per Plan… so if you wanted to do
anything more than just run a Maven Goal or execute an Ant Target,
you were stuck with creating a script that performs a number of
actions. That was not only inconvenient to configure and setup, but
it also wasn’t easy to debug when something went wrong.

Tasks replace Builders in Bamboo 3.1. Unlike Builders, a Job in
Bamboo 3.1 can have any number of Tasks, which are executed against
the same working directory in order. We’ve converted all existing
Builders to Tasks and made sure old Builders will continue to work,
although we do recommend that you upgrade any custom Builders you
may have. Tasks are of course implemented as Plugins and we’ve made
it really easy to write Task Plugins. And with the new Plugin
Exchange, it’s easy to discover available Tasks and install them in
your instance of Bamboo.

Tasks will give you a lot of flexibility when you set up your
Build and we are excited to see the use-cases users will come up
with. To make it as simple as possible to get a simple Build setup,
we’ve even added a Script Task that allows users to write a bash or
bat script inline.

JAXenter: What steps does Bamboo 3.1 take to
help users parameterise their builds?

Giancarlo: Parameterised Builds allow you to
customise parts of your Build when the
Build is run manually or via a script. Allowing you to run a
different suite of tests, run on a different platform, run against
a different set of test data or change version numbers on the
fly.

JAXenter: The Universal Plugin Manager now
comes bundled with Bamboo. What does this plugin add for Bamboo
users?

Giancarlo: Managing plugins and performing
Bamboo upgrades are now much easier. The
Universal Plugin Manager (UPM), already bundled with JIRA and
Confluence, is now bundled with Bamboo. The UPM allows you to:

– Manage existing plugins installed on Bamboo
– With just one click, upgrade all plugins that have updates
available.
– View and track updates made to plugins via the audit log.

JAXenter: What’s planned for upcoming releases
of Bamboo?

Giancarlo: Bamboo will continue to focus on
making it easier for agile teams to automate their build, deploy
and release process. This includes more control over builds and
build processes, jira integration and much more.